


Fireless

by lalaietha



Series: The Apocalypse According to C (with some Help from S and H) [2]
Category: Calvin & Hobbes
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-08
Updated: 2011-06-08
Packaged: 2017-10-20 06:16:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/209647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Then [Su] turned back to the window and leaned out of it. "Calvin," she said, like an invocation of doom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fireless

**Author's Note:**

> also written for DW-user ~law-nerd

_But if it had to perish twice,  
I think I know enough of hate  
To say that for destruction ice  
Is also great  
And would suffice. _

At four o'clock in the morning, Susanne Derkins' roommate hissed, "Su. _Su!_ Su, wake _up_!" until Su did, in fact, roll over to glare hard at the occupant of the other bed in the dorm room.

"What?" she demanded, rubbing at her eyes and wondering what the panic was this time. Harmony wasn't the worst roommate you could have - she was neat and clean and quiet and didn't steal stuff - but she always thought she'd heard something or that someone was sneaking into the dorm or _something_ and would panic about being murdered or assaulted in her bed at the least excuse -

The clatter off the window made Su sit up and squint at it.

It made Harmony shriek-squeak and point at it at it, already sitting in the middle of her bed with her sheets clutched up around her neck like some romance heroine or something. Su did not yell at her or even make a noise of disgust. She really wasn't a bad roommate, except for the whole . . . _thing_ , with her reading too many of _those_ kind of books. And that was only a problem sometimes. Su very carefully reminded herself of that, and of the potential for much worse if she subjected herself to the roulette of "get a new roommate."

"Someone's throwing rocks at our window!" Harmony whispered, as if that weren't obvious, and like somehow this would be a deadly threat of kidnapping or something, instead of most likely being one of the freshman boys illegally drunk and stupid. Su rolled her eyes, pushed back her covers, checked to make sure she was wearing pjs she didn't mind anyone seeing her in, walked over to the window and hauled it up.

She nearly got a rock in her face for the trouble. As she jerked back, there came the sound of someone - some guy - saying, "Oh, shit! Sorry! Sorry, Susie!"

The voice was almost unrecognizable, between not having actually heard it in _person_ lately and the attempt to make a whisper into a yell while remaining a whisper, but only four people in the world would ever call her -

 _Susie?_ Harmony mouthed at her, and Su took a moment to turn, point a finger at her roommate, and glare.

"Death," she hissed. "Don't _ever_ call me that. Ever. _Death_ , okay? Horrible, horrible death." Then she turned back to the window and leaned out of it. "Calvin," she said, like an invocation of doom.

It really was Calvin, too. He stood down underneath her window, looking up, just as blond and scruffy-looking as always. Su had often felt it was lucky for him that sometime around the end of high-school, "interestingly messy" had come in as a boy's hairstyle and never really gone out, or he'd be doomed. He wore a grey hoodie, his hands stuffed in the pockets and shoulders hunched up a little against the middle-of-the-night chill, and . . . yes, there was the flash of once-was-orange: Hobbes was tucked in the hood.

Calvin pulled one hand out to wave at her. He grinned, a little sheepishly. "I got the right window, hey?" he called up, and Su sighed, and leaned her forehead on one hand as she leaned against the window.

"Calvin, why are you here?" she demanded. You could never tell when Calvin's world was running on the same reality as anyone else's. It wasn't that he was psycho or anything - after his parents died he'd had a lot of psychiatrists and psychologists poking at him, and all they ever came up with was the ADHD - it was just that for him, the mundane parts of the every-day world (like, say, what time it was) were unbelievably boring, and so he pretty much considered paying attention to them to be optional.

Last Su had heard from _her_ parents, he'd been working for a design and billboard advertising company, which, according to her Mom, was "a good solid job for the boy and got him out in the fresh air", and he'd hardly been part of any disturbances since.

"I need to talk to you," Calvin said, scuffing his feet.

" _Now?_ " Su tried to keep her voice down to just loud enough for him to hear her, but she really wanted to yell.

"Yeah," he replied. "Look, I know it's late. I brought coffee and doughnuts. Real doughnuts. Come down and let me into the front porch, or they'll get cold. It's important," he added, scuffing his foot in the dirt again.

Su wasn't sure she believed him, at all, but at least there'd be Krispy Kremes. "Fine," she sighed. "It _better_ be." Then she stepped back and pulled the window down and closed.

"You're not seriously going down there?!" Harmony gasped, the interrobang clearly audible. Su rolled her eyes again as she pulled her own hoodie on over her head and looked for her slippers.

"It's just Calvin," she said. "I've known him forever. Trust me, if there's any danger to anyone, it's going to be to _him_ for bugging me over nothing." She found a clip and tied back her hair as neatly as she could, decided she looked put together enough, and went to the door. "Trust me," she repeated, looking at Harmony's dubious expression. "Worst case scenario, he's got some brilliant idea for a business I should get involved in with him, and I'll wake everyone up by yelling."

Harmony didn't look like she believed her, at all. Su took her key, figuring the likelihood of Harmony not only locking the handle but the deadbolt behind her was pretty high.

 

Calvin never really changed.

He'd grown up, of course, for a certain value of "grown up". He'd managed, with some (okay, a lot) of difficulty, and some (okay, amazing amounts) of Su helping (prodding him, nagging him, conspiring with his social-worker and house-supervisor to make sure he had absolutely no access to the internet or to video games except on Su's laptop to do actual work) and the magic of atomoxetine (for which thank God and the patron saint of pharmaceuticals) to graduate high-school with (to a lot of his teachers) shockingly high marks. He had his driver's license. He could even (as far as Su was aware) live on his own for extended periods of time without descending into biohazard, and he could feed himself and everything.

But the important parts of Calvin, the things that made him _Calvin_ , they never really changed.

Like, for instance, carrying that stupid stuffed tiger around.

He'd done that all the way through school, after his parents died. For the first little while, nobody'd said anything because they all knew about the car-crash and even Mrs Wormwood, who'd been rejoicing for the past three years that Calvin was now too old for her class, had been hell on anyone who gave him grief.

There _had_ been about a year, after the no-man's-land of respect for mourning, that every single bully gravitated towards Calvin and his stuffed toy like planets towards a sun, and Calvin had spent a _lot_ of time with Su and her friends (earning him all kinds of nicknames, "Fairy Boy" being the loudest only because the principal was a hammer of wrath against swearing - and that was _such_ a Calvin phrase) or in the library, doodling. Some of those pictures had disturbed the counsellor.

Then, over one summer, Calvin had gone from the smallest boy in school to roughly six feet tall, and from the scrawny kid to the one you could mistake for a senior as long as you didn't look at his face, because of his summer job in construction. Calvin had _almost_ got expelled, and _had_ got suspended two or three times, before he finished his recklessly gleeful tour of vengeance.

Somehow, in the strange bonding of boys that Su didn't even want to understand, after they'd both pounded each other into hamburger for a while, he and Moe (Maurice, by then, and trying to shake off his old reputation) had become, if not best friends, at least great pals. She still didn't get that one.

And through all of it, Hobbes-the-stuffed-tiger rode around in the back of Calvin's hood, or in the front section of his backpack, or stuffed into some pocket. And every so often Calvin would grin or scowl at something no one else could hear.

Su thought about all this, as she went down the stairs (because it was Thursday, so there was a solid chance some early-starter had already puked in the elevator) and tried not to yawn.

 _It's just Calvin_ , she'd said to Harmony, _I've known him forever_ , and that kind of summed it up, but not really. She should have said, _It's just Calvin, he's a friend, I've known him forever_ , because it was truer. Calvin didn't have a lot of friends - lots of buddies, lots of pals, but not a lot of _friends_ \- and Su knew she was one of them.

Whether she liked it or not, really.

And when it came down to it, there could be no other explanation for why she was, currently, walking down the stairs to meet him in the foyer. Not even Krispy Kremes. Calvin didn't have many friends, and she was one of them. Hell, outside her parents, she might be all of them. And she'd thought that before, and she hadn't talked to him in ages, and now he was throwing rocks at her window and telling her it was important.

Being human, she thought and not for the first time, was full of weird things like this.

 

For old time's sake, she might have met him at the door with, "Produce the doughnuts or die a dishonoured liar," but Calvin anticipated her and was holding them up like a shield when he met her at the glass doors - doughnuts in one hand, tray with coffee in the other. She pushed the latch-handle down and leaned on the door-bar to let him in.

"This had better be important," she muttered, as he came in past her. "I have a test tomorrow."

"What on?" he asks, coming in and putting his burdens down on one of the battered tables that get stuck down here because there's nowhere else to put them, to go along with the slightly battered chairs that are there for roughly the same reason but also give people somewhere to sit while they're waiting for their girlfriend or boyfriend or best friend to get dressed and come down.

"Relevant psychopathologies and their presentations in pre-adolescent students," she said, as he turned around to hand her one of the coffees (which she shouldn't drink at this time of night but from which the scent of cheap imitation vanilla and way-too-much-sugar was rising and seriously weakening her will to resist) and one of the doughnuts, which was in fact still warm. "What do you _want_ , Calvin?"

And right now, just right now, it occurred to her to think, dear God please let it not be that someone _else_ important has died. It was hard to tell, with Calvin. It wasn't that he wasn't _good_ at grief, it was that he was _weird_ at it. It just didn't look like anyone else's. So there was a chance, and that would be just too much.

"Well, okay," said Calvin, turning around and sitting on one of the chairs with his own coffee, looking scruffy and familiar and really young. "I have good news, and then again I have bad news. The good news," he went on, "is that even if you do take the test tomorrow, the outcome will end up being completely irrelevant to the rest of your life."

Su sighed. She leaned her forehead against her coffee, or her coffee against her forehead, or something. She steeled herself. Because this, _this_ had the signs of Calvin being weird again all over it. "Really," she said, just to keep things going.

"Yeah," he said. "But then there's the bad news, which, in the fine tradition of bad news everywhere, is kind of . . . well, I guess you could say it's bringing friends."

"Okay," said Su, and she sat down too, because what the hell, at least it would probably be entertaining. "Tell me about the bad news."

"The first part's sort of bad news for both of us." He stopped, almost like he was listening. "Right, actually, scratch that - all of it's bad news for both of us, I'm just kind of used to the second part of the bad news. _Anyway,_ " he went on, when Su started to make sure she looked impatient, "the first part of the bad news is you're not going to believe me, and you're probably going to be really pissed off at me."

Su closed her eyes. This was classic Calvin. Nobody who didn't _know_ Calvin would believe it. "Thus," she said, "the doughnuts."

"Right," he agreed.

"Okay," she said, sighing, "tell me the unbelievable bad news."

"The world's going to end. Tomorrow. It's going to start at about, shit, I forget - " and he stopped like he was listening again, "- something like 11:30? It won't get here till evening, though."

Su opened her eyes again. She sat up. She _looked_ at him, and took a breath, realized she didn't have anything coherent to say, and let it out again. Looked at him again.

The thing was, Calvin's face couldn't've got more serious. She knew he had a good poker-face, but _she_ could always see the sparkle, and there was no sparkle. Just deadly, deadly serious, and enough earnest to put on an Oscar Wilde play.

She said nothing. Calvin sighed, and went on, "I'm kind of ready for it. I mean, as much as anyone can be ready for the end of the world, because it's kind of the end of the world, although that might be a sort of general exaggeration because the planet isn't necessarily going to blow up so that's why I _bothered_ getting ready, but the point is, I've got stuff, and if we go now, we can be good and far out of the blast radius, like, and comfortable before tomorrow night. But, even if we leave later, I think we'll be fine."

"Right," said Su, successfully not screaming or throwing things. "And you know this . . . how?"

"You'd believe my answer to that one even less," Calvin told her.

 

In the end, she didn't yell at him. She didn't throw the coffee at him or the doughnut. Instead, Su explained to Calvin in a very calm voice that he was right, she _was_ kind of pissed off at him, seeing as it was the middle of the night and _she had a test tomorrow_ and he was being weird and ridiculous and also, middle of the night, and he'd almost hit her with a rock -

"I didn't mean to," Calvin protested, the only part he protested.

"Right," she said. "Calvin? I'm going back upstairs. I'll talk to you . . . later. A lot later."

"Yeah," he replied. Like he was disappointed and sad, a bit, but he'd expected this. "Take the doughnuts, though. They're yours."

She did take the doughnuts. Normally, she'd've asked him if he had somewhere to sleep too, because she suspected he was sleeping in whatever car he'd got here in. And normally she'd've said, no, you can't sleep in your freaking car, gimme a sec and see if my buddy will let you use his blow-up mattress he keeps under his bed. Today, she was too annoyed.

"Good _night_ , Calvin," she said pointedly. "Security doesn't like it when non-students are in the dorm buildings."

"Yeah," Calvin said again, with a sigh this time. "See you tomorrow."

He would, Su thought, absolutely _not_ see her tomorrow. This wasn't cool, and he wouldn't see her even if that meant she had to hide in the deepest darkest corners of the library and live off vending-machine food.

Upstairs, Harmony started to ask about who _that_ was, but Su waved her off. "Shut up and have a doughnut," she said, putting the box down on their shared table. "I don't want to talk about it."

 

*****

"Told you so," Calvin said as he settled into his kinda-nest along the back seat of Old Faithful. Hobbes folded himself up along the laid-down front bucket-seat and rolled his eyes.

"It's polite to let people know what's going to happen when you can," the tiger said, stretching and conveniently not too big for the jeep. "Besides, it'll mean she already knows what's going on when it all explodes." Hobbes paused, and then glared at Calvin. "Don't ask me if I'm sure again."

"Wasn't going to," Calvin lied immediately, and Hobbes rolled his eyes again.

"Go over the plan again," he said, settling his chin on his paws.

Calvin rolled _his_ eyes. "We've already done that three times today," he complained, heard Hobbes growl, and sighed. "Fine, fine. When did you get so bossy, anyway?"

"When you started actually listening," Hobbes replied, with a yawn.

"So I could get you to stop being such a nag if I just ignored you?" Calvin grinned at the look he got.

"How would you like me to rip your arm off?"

"Jeez, touchy," Calvin said, in mock reproach. "Fine. Okay. Zero hour is, what, sometime around six. We should be up at the university by three, so we're ready. We know where her class is. They'll probably have everyone on, like, lockdown or something, so we'll have to be sneaky."

"God help us," Hobbes murmured, and Calvin aimed a kick that he didn't really intend to connect at Hobbes' head. It didn't. He went on.

"It's Susie, she's pretty good in a crisis, so she probably won't freak out, and there should be enough mass destruction that she'll believe us then. We get to the bike by five pm at the latest. Bike gets us here to Old Faithful, because bikes can go anywhere. In here and head for the hills, to one of the likely campsites, depending on what the radio says."

"The campsites are?" Hobbes prompted, and Calvin listed them off for him.

"Then we avoid people for at least two weeks 'cuz it's gonna be ugly," Calvin continued. "Keep as much of an ear for what the fuck is going on as we can, got the satellite shit set up, radio, whatever. After we've got a better idea of what's going on and where, we start figuring out who we can meet up with and how. And in the meantime, we teach Susie how to shoot."

"She's going to want to go look for her parents," Hobbes said, something he'd seemed to explicitly avoid pointing out before. Calvin grimaced.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "Maybe we will. That part of the plan is open, right? First step is staying alive long enough to make that kind of plan."

Hobbes blew out a tiger-sigh of agreement. Calvin flipped the battery-powered lantern off, and settled back against pillows and bags, pulling the fire-blanket over him. He debated with himself a little bit, and then sighed, and figured, why not?

"Buddy?" he asked the dark.

The sound of a tiger on the edge of passed out came back with, "Mnrph?"

"You know I trust you, right?"

A pause, and then, " . . . riiiight . . . ?" Hobbes' voice said, with a "there's a catch here, don't think I'm not watching for it" note.

"How do you know this shit?"

Calvin had asked, once before. Way back at the beginning, he'd asked, and Hobbes had shaken himself all over and then bared teeth that had consistently gotten bigger and more tiger-like over the years. He'd said, "Just trust me," and what was Calvin supposed to do with that?

Now he was asking it again, and instead of teeth he got silence. "I just do," Hobbes said.

"Ever going to tell me?" Calvin pressed, trying to keep the hurt out of his voice, and got silence again.

"When you can believe it, maybe," Hobbes said, finally, in an unusual sort of voice. Calvin feels one of his own eyebrows going up.

"I used to believe getting under a cardboard box would turn someone into a worm," he pointed out, a bit - well, pointedly. "And that gravity could stop working for a day."

"Yeah," Hobbes admitted. "But there's a difference."

"Between?"

There came the sound of Hobbes blowing air out over his teeth and tongue. "Between believing fantastical things that _aren't_ true and believing fantastical things that _are_ true."

Calvin's other eyebrow joined the first one. "I'd like to point out," he said, in his best educated voice, "that I'm in a jeep full of survival stuff prepped for the end of the world because a tiger told me to be."

"And you still wonder if I'm just a really intense projection of your alter ego, sometimes," Hobbes retorts, scoring a point.

"Okay, fine, but that's not my fault." He scowled in the direction of the lump his night-vision could make out better now. "That was Dr Phan's idea."

Hobbes gave a low growl. "Only the rest of her fine work kept me from eating the woman for that," he muttered.

"Fine," Calvin said again. "Fine, I'll just believe you know what you're doing."

"I'll have commemorative cards made up," Hobbes retorts, and Calvin aims another kick at him.

"I'm trying to be conciliatory, fleabag," he said.

"You're not very good at it," Hobbes said, muttering again, and now Calvin just rolled his eyes. There was no talking to the big cat when he got like this. He just wanted to sulk and have hurt feelings, and there was no point in doing anything but letting him.

"Whatever," Calvin said. "Good night, you big baby."

Hobbes sneezed at him in the gesture of ultimate feline contempt short of actually ripping your arms off. Calvin gave his eyes one last roll, even though Hobbes wouldn't see it (being as he'd have his eyes ostentatiously closed after something like that), stretched one last time, yawned, and closed his eyes.

Tomorrow was going to suck. Better to face it on a full night's sleep.

*****

 

On the day the world ended, two cities were gone before Su even knew about it.

Not blown up. Not burned down. Not bombed flat. Just _gone_ , shattered, a gigantic pile of splinters and body-parts. It wasn't even until the second one that the news outlets knew what was happening.

It hit Twitter before that. Things always hit Twitter before the real news, as people on the edge of the destruction reached in shuddering awe for cell-phones, computers, tablets hooked up to the 3G network. But Su wasn't anywhere near Twitter. She was writing her test. Just like the rest of her class.

Towards the end - about the time the second city went down, as far as she could ever remember later (San Francisco following that little city, Victoria, on the Canadian West Coast) - Su and her class started to hear the disturbance outside, people shouting in the corridors or outside: _dude! Did you fucking hear?_

Su's teacher, dedicated as always to her calling, closed the windows and closed the door and scowled at them all until they were done. Su wrote probably the worst test in her life, just so she could be done and get out of there. Find out what was happening. Find out why.

Except that in her gut, she already knew; in her head, Calvin sat on the battered chair in her dorm front porch and told her the world was going to end. Impossible to believe, but impossible to forget.

The halls were empty now, but the minute Su got out of the building she saw Ismail sitting on the edge of one of the huge planters with his iPhone in his hand. "Hey," she said, and he looked up as she hurried over. "What the fuck - " she started, but he was already nodding, like he knew what she was going to say.

"San Francisco and a Canadian city got wiped off the map," he said, looking grim. "And Twitter says Paris and Mumbai are gone, too."

Su stared at him. "What do you mean, _gone_?" she demanded, but all Ismail did was shrug helplessly.

"I don't even know," he said. "Nobody does - here, look." He flipped the iPhone horizontal and touched the screen; Su found herself looking at a video scanning itself over a vista of . . . well. Of a city reduced to matchsticks.

She stared at it. She took the iPhone, and Ismail let her. After she'd watched it twice, she said, "But there's no fire. Almost no fire. I mean - "

"Yeah," Ismail said, face serious. "I know. If it were a bomb . . . " he let it trail off.

"This has got to be a prank," Su started, but Ismail shook his head.

"It's everywhere, Su," he said, simply. "It's real."

"What the fuck destroys a city without - " she started, but he shook his head again.

"Nobody knows. Most of the news sites are timing out a lot, but I came out here because all the rooms with TVs are so crowded. But it's everywhere, and nobody knows."

"You said, Mumbai and - " Su shook her head, trying to grasp this. Trying to grasp it and remembering Calvin, and doughnuts.

"Paris," he said, "last I could get through to anything, that's what the reports said."

Something in his voice made her stop, made her think, and then cover her mouth in horror. "But that's where - " she started, but he cut her off.

"Yeah," he said, in a kind of viciously careful lightness, "I really know that, trust me."

That was where, he hadn't let her say, his mother and his sister and his grandparents were, Paris was. And Mumbai was where everyone else he'd ever known in his life except for here at school was. "You haven't heard anything," she said, softly.

"Nope," he replied. "And don't say you're sorry and don't hug me, please." His voice was even.

"Okay," she said, nodding. "Can I do anything?"

He shrugged, his face drawing itself into a kind of terrible empty half-smile. "Pray?" he said. "Make the fucking sites load."

"Go check the TV and then come back and tell you?" she offered, and watched Ismail take a deep breath.

"Yeah," he said, evenly. "Yeah, that'd be good. Thanks."

"Okay," Su replied, nodding. She hesitated, and asked, "And if I see Farah, do you want me to tell her . . . " She let it trail off herself, this time. Waited while Ismail thought about whether he wanted to see his fiance right now.

"Yeah," he said, slowly. "Sure. I'll be here."

"Okay," Su repeated. And then resisted the urge to hug him and gave him a joking half-salute instead. "See you in a minute."

 

She didn't. Su never saw Ismail again.

She'd only walked halfway to the nearest on-campus cafe that had a TV before Calvin stepped out from behind a building and took her arm.

She nearly punched him for that. Not even on purpose, just on the basis that after three years of college and a lot of safety lectures about being a young woman on campus, Su had trained herself to feel that anyone (especially any male) who stepped out from behind something and grabbed her deserved an immediate broken nose; being on edge didn't help that reflex.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Calvin had spent those same three years in the kind of lifestyle that got you used to the occasional fist-fight, so he caught her other wrist before it connected with anything. "Jesus _fucking_ Christ, Calvin," she hissed. "What the fuck are you doing? Are you trying to be an asshole?"

Calvin didn't answer that. He just looked at her, with a kind of seriousness she hadn't seen on his face since his parents' funeral. "We have to go," he said, and he said it while looking around to make sure nobody saw him.

Su's brain stalled out for a moment. Stalled out and spun its wheels. Suddenly the world in front of her was full of the video on Ismail's screen, full of the brick wall of _cities destroyed_. Without warning, without war, without anything, just _gone_. She'd asked Ismail if she could help because it was something to do. She'd asked him if she could go and find out about stuff for him because it gave her a purpose and let her be practical and sensible and figure things out.

Now Calvin had stopped her, had thrown her a curve-ball in words, so that the image on the iPhone crashed into the memory of last night and between them cracked her mind open.

"How did you know?" Her voice startled her by being quiet. "How did you _know_?"

Calvin's face was - it was grim. That was the only word. "I told you," he said, "you wouldn't believe me. And we don't have time. We need to go."

"What are you talking about?" she demanded. She yanked her arm out of his hand. Tried to yank her arm out of his hand. "Calvin let me go _right now_ , I have to - "

"You have to come with me," he said, but he did let her go. "Seriously - "

"Look," she started, trying to get her thoughts into order, "I am helping a friend - "

"We need to leave," he repeated, and she tried to ignore him.

" - and you're not making any sense _at all_ , and I am sure as _hell_ not running - "

" _Susie, it's coming here!_ "

Calvin had hold of her upper arms. He'd shaken her a little, with the words. Su found her voice had stopped, and she stared at him. Then she tilted her head a little to stare at where his hands were.

He let her go like she'd burned him. "It's coming here," he said, quieter. "We have to go. If we go now, we can be out of the blast radius and safe - "

"What the fuck do you mean," she interrupted him, "'it's coming here'?"

Calvin took a deep breath. He was wearing the same hoodie as last night, she noticed. And his stupid, stupid toy was still in the hood. "I don't know _what's_ doing this," he said. "But I know it's going to be here. Soon. And then it's going to be everywhere. The best thing to do is get the hell out of cities. We can do that. I have enough stuff that we can do that, but we have to get there, and then we have to get _out of here_ before the highways clog up and - "

"What? No," she said, shaking her head, "no, if you know something, you have to tell - "

"Tell _who_?" he demanded. "Christ, Susie, _you_ don't even believe me yet, how fucking long would it take me to convince anyone important that I'm not just some hypochondriac? And even if I do, what then? _We're in the middle of America._ It's not like anyone's got a plan for this. Not one that matters."

Su's fingers were at her temples. She had to think. She had to _think_ , and that was really hard right now, the hardest thing: she had to separate mental noise into actual thoughts, actual sense, and Calvin was still talking - "Shut up," she said. "Shut up shut up shut up _shut up!_ "

Calvin shut up.

Su pressed her hands into her temples, and then dragged them over her mouth and looked back up at him. "Tell me that the reason you know about this _isn't_ because you had anything to do with it," she said, ripping through her thoughts and forcing them into order.

"It's not," he said, his voice fervent. "I swear I had absolutely - "

"Okay, shut up," she said again. He'd said she wouldn't believe him, if he told her how he knew. And he was right: if she couldn't believe him . . . "Calvin, a lot of people are going to die here, if you're right. If we can't do anything."

"A lot of people are going to die everywhere," he said, "and we can't. If we moved everyone out of cities into a refugee camp, the refugee camp would just get hit - whatever this is, it's trying to kill _people_. I can't - I mean, if we're lucky, we can save _us_ \- "

"Shut up again," Su cut him off. This time he looked like he was going to argue, but he didn't. He stopped and closed his mouth, and sighed. Tried to hide it, but sighed. She bit her thumb knuckle and tried to make her mind move to the next step. Stared at Calvin and willed him to make sense.

He just stayed Calvin: scruffy and messy-haired and sharp-faced, with the stupid tiger in tow like some kind of talisman or protective charm. A way more serious Calvin than she was used to, okay, but just Calvin.

Who looked back at her and eventually said, softly, "Look, what happens if I'm wrong? You miss classes on a day everyone's flipping out anyway and I bring you back and you tell stories about your crazy overreacting friend that you humoured and I'll go away until you're not pissed off at me anymore."

Su closed her eyes. "Why me, Calvin? Why are you _here_?"

When she opened them again, Calvin just shrugged. "Who else have I got? I mean," and for just a second he looked exasperated, like the subliminal frame in an old movie, "manifested, like."

There was that. "Okay," Su said, slowly, her voice a little hoarse. "Okay. I have to - " she made herself think again. "I have to go get some stuff from my room. And I have to call my parents."

Calvin frowned. "We don't really - "

" _I have to go get some stuff,_ " Su repeated herself, snapping this time, " _and I have to call my parents!_ "

"Okay!" Calvin stepped back, hands up. "Okay. Just. Hurry, right?"

 

There was money. It might be useless, but it might not. There was her knife (guilty-secret present from her dad, technically outlawed in the dorms but nobody ever checked her room). Some clothes - lots of her clothes, really. Guiltily, she added the rather battered shape of Mr Buns. And the left-over T3s from when she got her wisdom teeth out.

Su hesitated over her Kindle, but eventually put it in. There were hundreds of books on that. And you could come up with ways to produce electricity, right? And if it did turn out to be dead weight, at least it wasn't that _much_ dead weight and she could get rid of it.

As she stuffed the rectangle in her bag, Su realized that thinking like that meant some part of her believed him.

She called her parents, and neither of them answered. Their cells wouldn't even connect, and the landline went to voice-mail. She tried four times, and eventually remembered that someone had told her once that if you sent a text-message, they stayed in the queue until the lines were clear; she sent them both the same. _I'm okay. You should get out of the city as fast as you can. I'll try to contact you later._

And the same thing on the home phone, except that she added, _I love you._

Harmony was nowhere to be seen. Su wiped her eyes, shouldered her unbelievably heavy backpack, and left. She locked the door behind her.

 

Calvin waited for her downstairs. The calls itched at her mind; she wanted to ask him if he knew if - well. If he knew if their mutual hometown was still on the map. But she didn't. She would ask him later, when she made him tell her how he knew in the first place. Even if it was completely unbelievable.

"Okay," she said. "Let's go."

 

 _Assuming you can get any broadcast on your computer or TV, or if you've given up and embraced the antique joy of the radio, you will hear a lot of gallows humour, a lot of truly bleak jokes about the apocalypse in real time, from men and women grasping at any way to cope, men and women whose sincere concern has been burnt out by hours of hell on earth._

 _Something is scouring the earth. There are a thousand speculations as to who it is, and why; none of them have any evidence._

 _Nobody has claimed responsibility. By consensus, the name for whatever is doing this oscillates between_ The Phenomenon _and_ The Destroyer _. Any number of cults, great and small, scream about the End Times, but there is no Rapture, and no angels appear._


End file.
